On November 7th, the Norwegian head of Sarawak Energy took great care to make his accusations against the Penan tribespeople at the Murum Dam blockade as public as possible, by insisting on broadcasting them in full on our site.

In an email to the Swiss NGO BMF, which he copied into our comments section, he claimed that these families had been extorting money from members of the public, by setting up a toll on the public road. (more…)

Rounded up and told to pay cash for work permits – the sudden amnesty was announced with one month’s notice as election talk started in 2011

Many people feared at the time that the so-called 6P Malaysia programme was some kind of voter registration exercise, along the lines of the notoriousProject IC in Sabah.

Touted as a sudden amnesty by the BN government for illegal foreign workers, the programme (which lasted from July 2011-April 2012) allowed the immigrants to declare themselves and pay a fee for an official permit to stay on for two years.

However, Sarawak Report has learnt through agents hired to process the permits that the main purpose of the exercise was to raise funds for BN’s election war chest. (more…)

Member of Mohammed Nedim’s protection team and the half million ringgit status symbol, Hummer H2, that has ended up in the hands of the Nazri family, but which is still registered under the name of its purchaser, Michael Chia!

This big black beast of a car is an American Hummer 2 SUV, one of the most expensive vehicles in the world, costing around half a million ringgit on the Malaysian market.

For well over a year one of these models, registration number WNX9776, has been driven around KL by Mohamad Nedim Nazri, the son of a key Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz. (more…)

Sarawak Energy – keep off our lands! The desperation of the Penan people who have lost their hunting grounds and are starving

We can disclose that shocking revelations from a leaked report are what lie behind the massive road block at the Murum Dam site, where scores of lorries have been brought to a grinding halt by Penan tribespeople.

The impoverished hunter-gatherers mounted the desperate protest in response to learning key details of the resettlement and compensation plans, drawn up by the Government for when their homes are soon flooded by rising waters. (more…)

Windows closed shut, air-con on, Lawan ignores his outraged voters as he speeds off from Serian

With his constituents in revolt over the theft of their lands and destruction of their bridge by loggers, State Assemblyman Snowdan Lawan made an obligatory visit to Balai Ringen yesterday.

But, he then hid in the police station and refused to come out and speak to the protestors outside!

“There were at least 200 people waiting to hear what he had to say about this company United Teamtrade, which has been causing all this trouble” said one onlooker, “but he just kept them waiting in the hot sun outside the police station, while he enjoyed coffee in the air-conditioned room inside”. (more…)

Yet another ministerial mansion has sprouted up in Kuching and it tells us all we need to know about the corruption of the state.

The proud owner is Awang Tengah, the Second Minister for Planning in Sarawak (Taib is, of course, the First Minister for Planning) and after a year of construction Tengah has just moved in.

Locals in the surrounding district of Petra Jaya have been left wondering how it is that a state minister, who receives approximately RM17,000 a month, has been able to possibly afford such an enormous construction? (more…)

Profits of office? James Masing is just one of the BN YBs with unexplained wealth

The huge homes belonging to Taib Mahmud’s political allies is one of the unanswered and glaring issues in Sarawak.

How come so many ministers and YBs, who started on their political careers with no wealth at all, have ended up living in such style, when the salaries for public office are quite rightly modest?

There is no ban on a rich man seeking election. However, no one should exploit their political position to make themselves rich. It is this form of corruption that has destroyed Sarawak.

Masing, who is the Iban leader of the PRS political party, a key constituent of Taib’s BN coalition representing UMNO’s control of the state, is by no means the only example of these flash homeowners. (more…)

Fear of gangsters is widespread in Sarawak and with good reason. These are the operators outside the law who enforce the greedy land grabs and logging concessions handed out by Taib to his cronies.

By using gangsters, Taib and his business partners avoid being directly implicated and can pretend to have nothing to do with illegal methods.

However, the police know better. They stand aside and turn a blind eye to the thugs, because they know who they really work for and it is not for the poor natives whose lands and livelihoods are being taken away. (more…)

Sabah Chief Minister, Musa Aman, branded Sarawak Report maliciously motivated liars and implied we were master forgers, after we revealed financial documents showing that his nominee, Michael Chia, had laundered nearly a hundred million US dollars of timber kickbacks on his behalf.

However, we now challenge him to name the Swiss bank UBS AG liars as well, because their submissions to a current court case in Singapore confirm our evidence! (more…)

Hydro-Tasmania seem to have taken over as the leading experts backing Taib’s dam programme

The Green Party in Australia is demanding explanations from Hydro-Tasmania about what exactly its subsidiary Entura is up to in Sarawak?

Investigations by Sarawak Report have revealed that Entura, which acts as a consultancy arm of the publicly owned company, has become deeply involved in a whole range of projects linked to Taib’s plan to flood Sarawak with 12 new dams over the coming years. (more…)

The concessions came thanks to his brother, the local Chief Minister, Musa Aman.

The documents form part of a major investigation by the MACC into timber corruption, after an agent and nominee for Musa Aman, Michael Chia, was caught attempting to smuggle SG$16million out of Hong Kong in 2008. (more…)

BN mouthpieces, such as the Borneo Post, have been working hard to discredit the integrity of Sarawak Report and all our investigations, revealing the corruption behind the destruction of the Borneo Rainforest and its peoples.

They refer to mysterious “hidden agendas” and have quoted accusations that we are producing “baseless and mischievous” information resting on “dubious sources making several erroneous statements and allegations”. (more…)

Taib Mahmud’s $5million dollar a year ‘Cyber-war Campaign’ has conceded a humiliating defeat, with the final demise of the site ‘Sarawak Reports’.

Sarawak Reports was part of a vicious network of internet sites, set up by the crooked UK-based production FBC Media, in a hired attempt to undermine this blog and to attack the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

By adopting a virtually identical name to our own FBC clearly hoped they could confuse web-surfers into reading their pro-Taib propaganda, instead of our research into Taib’s 30 years of corrupt government.

However, there is little evidence that readers were in fact fooled but this costly exercise. The site never dared to publish the handful of comments it received for its stories, which were little more than dreary ‘puff pieces’ praising Taib’s ‘progress and development’ policies. (more…)

Sarawak’s PKR Leader Baru Bian has expressed his “utter disgust” at the extent of the foreign properties owned by the Chief Minister and his family, as revealed in a series of recent exposes by Sarawak Report. ”For us it has been shocking as we read one report after another”, he said.

The opposition leader also explained that the information, which has been kept hidden until now, has served to further highlight the “huge disparity” between the Chief Minister and ordinary people in Sarawak, who are amongst the poorest in Malaysia, despite the natural wealth of the state.